Sunday, April 15, 2012

"Mad Men," Season 5, Episode 5, "Signal 30"

The banality
of the suburbs is the central theme of this week’s Mad Men episode, “Signal
30.” Pete Campbell is horribly unhappy
living out in Greenwich and he and Trudy have become the new version of Don and
Betty. They are the couple that appears to have everything on the outside: a
plethora of consumer goods, a nice home, and a child. The reality, however, is not nearly as
pleasant, as Pete tells Don, “I have nothing.”

Suburbs
have a long history in the United States dating to the late 19th century,
when streetcars enabled people to escape the congestion and crime of the city
for the more rural life of the suburbs. It
almost seemed that Americans had a Jeffersonian urge to return to something
resembling the agrarian ways of their ancestors. Of course, some native-stock Americans had
less high-minded motives and were simply trying to escape the diverse immigrant
population that increasingly dominated urban life in the early 20th
century. With the emergence of cars,
suburbs grew significantly during the 1920s although their rise stalled during
the 1930s with the onset of Great Depression.

After the
end of World War II, suburbs expanded dramatically. Assisted by the postwar economic boom and
federal housing loans, millions of middle-class Americans left the cities in
the 1950s and purchased their first home, with 83 percent of population growth
occurring in the suburbs (Patterson, Grand
Expectations, p. 333). New York City witnessed particularly dramatic change,
as the suburban population rose by 58 percent as urban dwellers left for
Westchester County, Long Island, and Connecticut (Polenberg, One Nation Divisible, p.333). Some whites also moved because of the black and
Puerto Rican migration to the city during this time. Faced with the loss of a significant portion
of their middle-class fan base, the city could no longer support three baseball
teams and the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants left for California in 1957. The Yankees did not have the city to themselves
for long, though, as major league baseball created the expansion New York Mets
in 1962 (note the conspicuous placing of Lane Price’s Mets banner in his
office)

Critiques
of the suburbs are almost as old as the institution itself. During the 1950s, many intellectuals viewed
the suburbs as bastions of homogenous thinking. “The suburb,” the
sociologist David Riesman wrote in The Lonely Crowd, was “like a
fraternity house at a small college in which like-mindedness reverberates upon
itself.” Betty Friedan went further, calling
them “comfortable concentration camps” for housewives in her classic feminist
tract, the Feminine Mystique (1963).

From the
outset, “Mad Men” has featured a heavy
dose of the anti-suburban ideology. Since
season one, Betty Draper has seemed completely unhappy in the ‘burbs and I have
always thought that her first name was an homage to Friedan. Furthermore, Don seems much happier in his
city life with Megan and doesn’t even want to go to the Campbell’s suburban
home for a party on a Saturday night, saying, “that’s when you really want to
blow your brains out.” Afterward, he
declares, “when I close my eyes and then I open them I want to see
skyscrapers.”

Though
Pete and Trudy’s relationship had been the strongest of any couple on the show, the
birth of their first child and the move to the suburbs seems to have wrecked
it. She probably has postpartum
depression and he appears miserable to the point that he makes a pass on an 18
year-old girl in his driving class (he never learned growing up in
Manhattan). In a move reminiscent of Don
in the old days, he also has a liaison with a prostitute while wooing a client.

”It seems
like time is speeding up,” says Jenny, the student Pete is pursuing. Though a few contemporary events are
mentioned, such as Charles Whitman’s mass shooting of students at the
University of Texas, this episode focuses less on the social changes of 1966
than the previous four. Instead, it
centers on the age-old theme of the unhappy suburbanite, which has been a standby
of film and television for over a half-century.

For more
on the history of suburbs, Kenneth Jackson, The
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York,
1985)